


Meet Your New Road

by honey_wheeler, lit_chick08, thefairfleming



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Victorian, F/M, Fake Marriage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-04
Updated: 2014-12-04
Packaged: 2018-02-28 03:13:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2716790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler, https://archiveofourown.org/users/lit_chick08/pseuds/lit_chick08, https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefairfleming/pseuds/thefairfleming
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To celebrate the 500th Jon/Sansa fic, we bring you Fake Marrieds in multiple universes! Chapter 1: Victorian Fake Marrieds. Chapter 2: Russian Spy Fake Marrieds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It should have been just another role, no different than any of the dozens they’d played opposite each other, the two of them. Jon Snow and Sansa Stark, darlings of society, lights of the stage, personal favorites of Her Majesty Queen Victorian. Jon had played Laertes to her Ophelia, Sebastian to her Viola, Orestes to her Electra. This should have been but one more role.

Perhaps it might have been, but for how she keeps _kissing_ him. There was never much in the way of kissing between Laertes and Ophelia – it would have been quite a different play if there had been – so perhaps Jon can’t be blamed for being so thrown. Then again, if all those other roles had featured kissing between them, Jon would have known before now how his stomach would turn into a fiery knot at the kiss she presses to his lips in an indecorously exuberant show of fake marital bliss, and how all he’d want to do is kiss her again, and then again, and maybe even forever.

“It’s our honeymoon,” she’s saying to the desk clerk, as Jon reels from the feel of her mouth on his. They’ve been friends since they were but children dashing about in the wings, their roles more play than work, back when Jon could still play female roles before his changing voice and broadening shoulders made such things impossible. This wasn’t something he’d anticipated.

Or perhaps it was, and that was why he studiously avoided Sansa even as he dallied with more than one of the other actresses with whom he'd shared a stage. Perhaps he’d always feared that nothing with Sansa could ever be casual.

“Isn’t it sweetheart?” she says to him, squeezing his arm to her side in a gesture that would seem besotted to the desk clerk but which Jon knows is meant to jolt him out of his stunned silence; they’ve worked together so long that speech is rarely needed for them to communicate. He knows Sansa can read the strange tension in his body, and that she must wonder at its cause. But to any observer, she only seems every bit the blushing bride; she always had a knack for throwing herself into a role.

“It’s our honeymoon,” Jon echoes faintly, offering the clerk a smile that he hopes is charming, but just feels unnerved to him. Perhaps that’s what softens the disapproval that’s been etched on her face since Sansa had turned to him and planted her lips on his, his elbow clutched in both her hands, the brim of her new hat, bought just that morning in a screamingly expensive boutique, scratching a ticklish line across his brow. The clerk’s expression doesn’t quite warm – based on his experience here so far, Jon isn’t sure Parisians are even capable of warmth towards Britons – but at least she looks far less inclined to call the police or eject them forcibly from her hotel. 

“I’m sure you’ll find our rooms very, ah… _romantique_ ,” she says, handing Jon a key. It dangles heavily from his hand as they make their way upstairs, a footman bringing their bags behind them. Sansa only relinquishes his arm when the narrow staircase forces her to precede him; the feel of her hand still burns like a brand around his elbow. When Sansa had turned to him in that little boutique, a hat perched on her head and another in her hand, and suggested they play a game and pretend they were married, “just to see if we can pull it off,” Jon had been hesitant, but it hadn’t seemed quite so disastrous an idea as it’s seeming now.

“It’ll be an adventure,” she’d said, using her best wheedling voice, the one he can never say no to. He’d have thought that taking off on a whirlwind tour of the globe with only a former colleague to provide company and play chaperone would have been adventure enough for her, but had left the thought unvoiced. Little can sway Sansa when she’s got her mind set, after all. And her games have always been good for a laugh. But Jon doesn’t feel like laughing now as he stands alone in the room they’ll share tonight as Sansa bustles about the adjacent dressing room, humming and changing from her traveling costume. He stares at the bed with the memory of her kiss still burning on his lips, a sinking feeling in his belly. God, but he wants to kiss her again. He wants to do far more than kiss her. It’s something of a shock to realize that he’s wanted to do more than kiss her for longer than he can remember, no matter that she was his friend and his colleague, a girl he’d practically grown up with and who’d played his sister so often that all of London seemed to think of them as nearly siblings in truth, Jon included. Seems that Sansa isn’t the only one good at throwing herself into a role.

“Jon?” she calls, disrupting his thoughts. “Would you come in here, please?”

She needs help lifting her trunk, she thinks, or reaching something on some high shelf. He doesn’t think to brace himself for what he sees; pale linens and ruffled underthings, petticoats and stockings and a corset covered by the unbound fall of her hair, and what seems like acres of peach and cream skin even though it’s not so much at all.

“Untie me, would you?” she asks, glancing over her shoulder at him and then turning her face forward to catch his eye in the mirror before her.

Jon doesn’t move. He can’t. He’s seen dozens of women in corsets and petticoats and underthings. He’s seen dozens of women out of them. Yet Sansa’s slim back turned to him, her hair pulled over her shoulder with one hand to expose the laces of her corset, makes him feel like a green boy who’s never even shaved his face, let alone touched a beautiful woman.

None of them have ever been beautiful like she is, though. The bones under her skin are like architecture, like the spires and buttresses of Notre Dame they’d seen out the window of the carriage as they came into town.

“Jon?” she prompts, catching his eye in the mirror before her, a look of confusion creasing her brow. Confusion and perhaps something else. No. He’s seeing things. He’s seeing what he suddenly – desperately – wants to see.

“Sorry.” His voice sounds rough and unused. With shaking hands, he reaches out to tug the laces from their bow. It’s scandalous behavior. He smiles faintly to think how her governess would shriek and screech at such casual impropriety. Perhaps Sansa thinks of him as the brother to her that most of London thinks he is, and thus safe to allow such intimacies. Jon ignores the sickly drop of his stomach at the thought; it’s better that way. Safer.

“You’re quiet,” she says. Her eyes are still fixed on his face in the reflection of the mirror, and she gives him a fond, teasing smile, the corners of her eyes pleating into the barest crinkles. “Are you not enjoying being my husband?”

As if it’s controlled by someone else entirely, Jon watches his hand lift from the laces of her corset and run one knuckle up the valley of her spine. She gasps as his touch ghosts over skin that instantly ripples into gooseflesh in a response that stuns him as much as it makes need twist in his gut. Surprised, he looks up at the mirror; her eyes are wide and unsure, as if she’s suddenly questioning the wisdom of sharing a room as a married couple.

Or – and Jon fervently wishes it to be so – appreciating it. How many roles does each of them play, he wonders distantly. He brushes his fingers over her again, sliding his hand up to her nape and tightening it gently, the short hairs there like gossamer against his skin. She gasps again, tilting her head back into his touch as her eyes flutter halfway closed and her body sags like a puppet with its strings cut. The need in his gut blossoms into something more, into the ache of new possibility.

“I think I could grow accustomed to it,” he says.

Her eyes open slowly, as if with effort. He steps closer to her, his chin nearly over her shoulder now, and from his closer vantage point, he can see her hands curled tightly around the edge of the vanity. “I think I could as well,” she says, and then she smiles.

Jon smiles back and lowers his hand to tug at her corset’s laces, pulling them through each eye with a sibilant hiss of fabric. Sansa’s games really always have been fun.


	2. Russian Spies Posing as Americans

It still amazes Jon that after sixteen years of sharing a house, a bed, and a life with Sansa how little he knows her. 

The useless details he knows. Jon knows she keeps her showers brief because she's never quite adapted to having hot water so readily available; she brushes and plaits her hair every night before bed to keep it from tangling. She sleeps in nightgowns even when the DC humidity turns their home into a swamp, and she flinches if he brushes her in bed. She turns off the television whenever possible, especially when the children have spent the day attached to it, and she worries too much about Alys because she does not understand an American girl in the 1980s is different from the little Russian girl she once was after the war.

There are things Jon has deduced. He knows she likes American sweets despite her complaints about American cuisine from the moment they arrived; she has never once turned down dessert and when she carried Benjen, she ate her weight in lemon cake. She tries hard with Alys but there is a disconnect there Jon knows bothers her; every time Alys appeals to him during one of their spats, Sansa looks so betrayed, as if she is the first mother whose teenage daughter is exasperated with her. Though she isn't one for silliness, when Benjen has his nightmares, he hears her throw her voice when she reads him stories. In the beginning she hadn't taken to being a mother, to conceiving and raising these children as part of their mission, but Jon knows she loves their children with a ferocity unrivaled by anything else.

He knows she does not love him.

The day they met, he'd still been in love with Ygritte. Happy to serve his country but heartbroken at leaving his girl, he hadn't tried as hard as he could have to earn Sansa's affection. But Sansa always held herself aloof, focused on the mission above all else, and the first time they even slept together was because they'd received orders to have a child. Their friends, Robb and Jeyne, they loved each other; when they all performed missions together, Jon asked Robb how it happened and he only shrugged. How do you explain falling in love?

They fuck people for information. Jon doesn't like to think about what Sansa does when she is tasked, and he tries to forget what _he_ does in the name of Russia. But what happens on missions is business, no emotions involved. It is only when Val, the pretty divorcee who moved in next door, starts to flirt with him, making it more than obvious she does not care about his marital status, that Jon finds himself sitting at the kitchen table with Sansa and blurting out, "Val Rayder wants to have an affair with me."

Sansa doesn't even look up from checking Alys's math homework. "That would be a poor choice. The neighbors would talk."

"That's all you have to say?"

She pauses, finally glancing up from the notebook with her brow furrowed in confusion. "What else would you like me to say?"

"I just told you our neighbor wants to fuck me."

"Harry Hardyng grabs my ass at every block party, and I don't feel the need to make a case out of it." Sansa returns her attention to eighth grade algebra. "You've gotten so dramatic lately."

"You wouldn't even care, would you? If I went next door right now and fucked Val on the front lawn, you wouldn't even blink."

Sansa sighs, setting down the pencil in her hand and folding her hands over Alys's careful printing. "Do you _want_ to have an affair with her? Is that what this is?"

"No! I want - I want you to care if I did!"

"I _would_ care if you did. Drawing unnecessary attention to us - "

"No, not because of that, because you'd be jealous!"

Sansa's face somehow becomes even more unreadable. "Jealousy has no place here. It's a useless emotion that leads to screwing up in the field."

"You don't even think of me as your husband."

"Of course I do. We live together, we have two children - "

"And if you got the order tomorrow to leave me, you'd do it without looking back."

The corners of Sansa's mouth twitch downward, confusion creeping onto her delicate features. "That's our job, Jon. We get orders, and we follow them. It isn't personal."

"We've shared a bed for sixteen years. We have children together. How is that not personal?"

It surprises him to see how genuinely distressed Sansa seems to be. After a moment of tense silence she manages, "What do you want me to say, Jon?"

Before he can say anything, Benjen's voice rings out from upstairs, a hint of panic in his voice as he shouts he has a nosebleed. They both get to their feet out of instinct, and Jon knows there will be no answers tonight.

He doesn't know if there will ever be answers.


End file.
